A WRITER'S WITVirginia Woolf said that writers must be androgynous. I'll go a step further. You must be bisexual.​Rita Mae Brown​Born November 28, 1944

New Yorker Fiction 2016

Alain Pilon

​November 28, 2016, Robert Coover, “The Hanging of the Schoolmarm”: In some iteration of the Old West, a schoolmarm closes down a saloon by winning it in a card game. ¶ One supposes that this short short story is a satire of our civilization in general. Schoolmarm rules the roost until the sheriff usurps her power and condemns her to hanging. She is a brave one, claiming that self pity “is the lowest state to which a person’s mind can fall” (81). One wonders if schoolmarm isn’t a mouthpiece for Coover:

“A landscape of rocks evokes a time before time, and the end-times as well, forcing us, while contemplating it, to live in all time at once, where words have nothing to attach themselves to” (81).

​Is this old man’s story deliberately attributed to two-dimensional characters, or is it an example of philosophic sophistication that one admires? The reader must judge the schoolmarm’s words:

“‘That is what rocks express. Though they are otherwise meaningless, they are, in this respect, the most meaningful thing we have, putting us in touch with oblivion. Which is the ineffablest thing of all’” (81).

Coover, eighty-four, not even listed in the Contributors for this issue, has a novel coming out in January: Huck Out West.Illustration by Alain Pilon.

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